Thursday Links: Have a Nice Day

Artist Ana Teresa Fernandez has used sky blue paint to “erase” a portion of the US-Mexico border wall. [Phoenix New Times]

The internet is obsessed with @_zolarmoon right now, who has captivated Twitter with a long-form narrative spread across over 150 tweets—she’s Shahrazad in stilettos. The account is supposedly non-fiction and begins with the narrator working as a waitress at Hooters. At the invitation of a customer, she departs for a Florida strip club and an insane misadventure that involves seedy motels, prostitution, thousands of dollars, a man jumping off a balcony, human trafficking, and murder. The general consensus across social media is “someone turn this into a movie.” [Complex]

Read this account of Paul McMahon and Linda Mary Montano’s trippy performance at McMahon’s retrospective at 321 Gallery in Clinton Hill. When I was staying in Montano’s old home upstate, I had the pleasure of visiting McMahon’s studio. One takeaway from that trip: McMahon’s work is smarter, funnier, and more biting than many of his “Pictures Generation” peers but refused to be “clean” or “gallery-ready” enough for the market of the 70s/80s. Today, it looks just great, and will probably be getting more of the attention it deserves. [ARTnews]

What is the digital art market value of the “Pepe the Frog” meme? How would such a market even operate? These are questions posed to real-life art world people after months of internet users creating a parody Pepe market. God, the internet is weird. [Buzzfeed]

Wednesday night, Toronto-based artist Abbas Akhavan received the Sobey Award—a $50,000 prize and one of the largest cash awards available to Canadian artists. He beat out IMG MGMT artist Jon Rafman (Quebec), Sarah Anne Johnson (Prairies and the North), Raymond Boisjoly (West Coast/Yukon), and Lisa Lipton (Atlantic). [The Globe and Mail]

Is it possible to come up with more reckless, socially irresponsible and just plain dumb art project, then a performance that includes setting fire to all of your student loan money? According to Central Saint Martins art student Brooke Purvis, the brainchild behind this work burning all this cash serves a higher good. “I could give that money to charity, but charity is capitalism’s solution to the problem it creates,” Purvis told Vice. “But it’s my money, remembering it’s a fiction, and like anyone, I choose to do what I want with it. Also, I believe I am doing something positive with it. The work I’m creating highlights what I believe to be very important issues.” [Artnet newsvia: VICE]

Kerr Houston has a nice, easy-to-read musing on the often uncertain relationship between contemporary art and the general public: “To claim, then, that contemporary art no longer shapes or defines our collective values is effectively to argue that our collective values cannot embrace diversity, or complexity” [BmoreArt].

Robin Grearson talks to artists in Gowanus who are being evicted from their space. [Hyperallergic]